Top 10 Technology Trends for 2015

Tuesday 23 December 2014

As a technology company we like to keep ourselves up to date with all the latest industry trends and as we enter 2015 Gartner have released a list of what they believe are the Top 10 strategic technology trends for this coming year. For 2015 these trends cover three emerging themes: the merging of virtual and real worlds, the advent of intelligence everywhere and the technology impact of the digital business shift.

1. ‘Computing Everywhere’ Gartner suggest there will be a change in the focus on devices to HOW the user and device interact in different environments and contexts.

2. ‘Internet of Things’ On the list for a fourth year, Gartner are reemphasising what they call the four basic “usage models”: Manage, Monetise, Operate and Extend. They also stress the idea that Enterprises should not limit themselves to thinking that only the Internet of Things (assets and machines) has the potential to leverage these four models.

3. ‘3-D Printing’ The market for relatively low-cost 3-D printing devices has grown in recent years. New applications of 3D printing including industrial, biomedical and consumer will continue to prove that 3-D printing is a viable and cost-effective means to reduce a business’s costs using improved designs, streamlined prototyping and short-run manufacturing.

4. ‘Advanced, pervasive and invisible analytics’ This is the first time we’ve seen this trend on the list and is perhaps the one most relevant to us here at Connexica. Gartner believe that the Internet of Things will add to the extortionate growth of structured and unstructured data filling the databases of companies. The amount and variety of data will require more advanced analytics than are currently available.

5. ‘Context-rich systems’ This trend links to both the Internet of Things and more advanced analytics. Gartner believe that the next step will be to ingrain intelligence into devices that will interact with the new and advanced analytics, resulting in systems that respond to environmental conditions as opposed to just report. Gartner claim that “Context-aware security is an early application of this new capability but others will emerge.”

6. ‘Smart machines’ 2015 will see prototypes of autonomous vehicles, advanced robots and the like, created, bringing the most disruptive smart-machine era in the history of I.T.

7. ‘Cloud/Client Computing’ Gartner believe that the convergence of cloud and mobile computing will continue to promote the growth of applications that can be delivered to any device. “Cloud is the new style of elastically scalable, self-service computing, and both internal applications and external applications will be built on this new style” The focus for cloud/client computing will be on synchronising content and application state across a variety of devices meaning applications will evolve in order to support simultaneous use of multiple devices.

8. ‘Software-Defined Applications and Infrastructure’ Software-defined networking, storage, data centres and security are maturing. In order to deal with the rapidly changing demands of digital business and rapidly scale systems up or down, computing has to move away from static models to be more dynamic state Gartner.

9. ‘Web-scale IT’ Gartner believe that organisations will consider incorporating global-class computing into their company settings taking influence from companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook. This will not be immediate but a process of evolution, as commercial hardware platforms embrace new models such as bringing development and operations together in a way to drive rapid, continuous and incremental development of application and services.

10. ‘Risk-Based Security and Self-Protection’ Last but not least, organisations will become increasingly aware that it is not possible to provide a 100% secured environment. Organisations will therefore begin to apply more-sophisticated risk assessment and mitigation tools, leading to new models of building security directly into applications. Gartner believe that every app now needs to be self-aware and self-protecting.

We’ll be interested to see how these trends progress throughout 2015 and what we’ll be writing this time next year!